Today I have organised my Christmas present.
I am feeling very pleased about this, because I am going to have just what I always wanted.
I have put ‘hyacinths in a pot’ on my Christmas list every year for ages, but even when I have remembered to put my Christmas list on Facebook, so far nobody has ever bought any for me.
This year is going to be different.
This afternoon I rescued some pretty plant pots from the building site that is our garden.
They have been around for years, but have been almost completely buried underneath an exuberance of strawberry plants and nasturtiums. I can’t really remember what I bought them for originally, but whatever creative idea it was, it has long been abandoned.
I took them into the kitchen and washed them clean of their horrid cobwebby layers of grit and brick dust and slug trails and leaf mould.
Then I filled them with compost and soil and planted hyacinth bulbs in them all.
I put them in a tray, and covered them with black plastic, and stuck them in the remains of the shed. They need to get cold for a few weeks, and then eventually they will start to shoot, and it might just be that they will be ready for Christmas, or maybe just afterwards.
I am so very pleased and excited about this.
I like hyacinths. They are my favourite plants. Sweet peas are my favourites as well, and to my great happiness a packet of sweet pea seeds arrived in the post today. This was a splendid miracle, because the post does not usually come on Sunday.
I have been planting the big plant pots this week, the heavy earthenware ones to sit in the new yard, and to be filled with the taller plants, the bushes and the shrubs.
I am excited about these. I have planted a white lilac, and a wisteria, and, to my great happiness, a burnt sugar tree, which is also my favourite plant.
The burnt sugar trees have shed their leaves this week, and their scent has been drifting, heavily, across the Library Gardens. Now I am going to have a little one of my own, in our own garden.
Of course in the end it will get too big for a pot, and it will have to go to the farm, but there will be a few years in between, when we will have its wonderful autumn smell outside our back door.
I had added bulbs to the pots, and today I added the sweet peas, which are the tumbling dwarf sort, and will spill beautifully over the sides of the pots. I had to look for a while to find a dwarf variety with a strong scent, but I found some, and a packet arrived today.
They are Unwins seeds. Unwins used to be the best in the world for sweet peas, until they stopped being a specialist seed merchant and started selling junk like garden benches and statues of gnomes. They are still jolly good, though, and I couldn’t resist ordering one of their varieties in amongst the order, even though they were terrifically expensive.
I had ordered sweet pea seeds last week, because you can plant them at this time of year, and if they do not get too frosted they will shoot really early and flower lots more than the spring-planted sorts.
They have not all arrived, just the Unwins packet, but it was enough to give me something lovely to do in the sunshine.
We had sunshine today, which was splendid. When I looked out of the office window this morning there were thick tendrils of steam rising from the roof of Mark’s new shed as the first of the sunlight began to warm the sodden world.
Mark did some more bricklaying and then finished rebuilding the wall on the last of the flowerbeds.
When the cement sets tomorrow I will be able to fill it with soil and plant some bluebells in it.
I have got English bluebell bulbs to go in there. I am very pleased and excited about these. They are much nicer than the Spanish variety.
In fact, they are my favourite plants.
Have a picture of the garden in its heyday.
